Thursday, August 20, 2009

Equal Education Update

Molweni,

Usaphila? (How are you keeping? in Xhosa) I just got done with my work week today. This week was pretty hectic, between class and school. I have been busy at Equal Education organizing for party that we are having his coming Monday. I have been sending out invites and confirming plans at the restaurants. Aside from sending email invites to everyone, today I called all the people to confirm that they are attending. We hope to have around 70 guests so I had to make quite a few calls. However, if you do not keep on people they will not remember to show up/RSVP. The calling was not in vein though, because I got a bunch of RSVPs out of it.

Following the calls I went to help out at the Youth Group meeting. This is where Equal Education gets all of its support from students. It is where students from all over come to meet up and help in campaigns. Today the students made posters and banners to be held up at walk on September 2nd. The posters for the most part looked really good and will hopefully get the message across on the 2nd. The majority of the EE staff was in Kraifontein today working at a walk for libraries. The event apparently went extremely well and according to conflicting reports there were between 700 and 2000 people. Either number would be considered a success. We got a lot of publicity due to an article in the newspaper following a press conference we held regarding the state of libraries on Tuesday.

Yesterday I visited South Peninsula High’s library where we will be taking a group of learners (students) from Khayelitsha. The idea is that seeing a functional library will motivate them to want to have the same quality library in their schools. It was a nice library, but nowhere near what a high school library should look like in the US. It looked more like an elementary school library and was only big enough for about a maximum of 20 learners. It did look quite nice for what they had though.

The day before I finished work early and picked up my computer. So I finally have my technology issues sorted and both my phone and my computer are working. It has been nice to have working instruments.On Monday I went around with Lumkile and Nokubonga (Bonga) and delivered letters to different schools in Khayelitsha. We were hand delivering the letters, in the hope that we would have the chance to talk to the principals at each of the schools. The letters were asking the schools to join our effort to achieve functioning school libraries and full time librarians in all schools in Khayelitsha. The larger goal is all of South Africa, but for the time being we are localized to Khayelitsha. It was interesting to drop off the letters because I got a chance to walk around a bit in Khayelitsha and visit about 15-20 schools in the area. Khayelitsha is a massive township so we were only in one section and we had to drive from school to school.At night there has not been too much going on. Besides watching Jerusalema, a movie about “gangsterism” in Johannesburg, things have pretty laid back. We do not have much planned for this week, but tomorrow we are going to visit Parliament. I am really looking forward to this.